I'm sure that you've seen a website that is simply impossible to navigate! Having a poorly designed website can hurt your business in many ways.

For Example:

- When a new visitors come to your website most will only take a few seconds to scan the page. If they can't easily find what their searching for they will hit the back button and go to the next search result.

- A poorly designed website can also prohibit the search engines spiders like "Google Bot" and "Yahoo Slurp" from crawling your website and creating an effective index of your site. This will inhibit your website from getting found in the search engines.

Below are some examples of things found on poorly designed websites.

- Header is too big. If you find yourself constantly scrolling down on your website, you should consider a smaller header which makes better use of the limited space on the computer screen.

- Navigation is on the right. Western writing systems as well as industry standards compel most visitors to look to the left for navigation. If your navigation menu is on the right, it could be a source of frustration for your visitors.

- Hidden navigation. Navigation areas should be clearly defined, separate, and easy to locate. If your navigation is hidden within the page, your visitors may find it easier to simply push the big red X and close your website!

- Overwhelming navigation. As you can see in the model, the "main content" should consume the great majority of the page. If you have excessive navigation menus or advertising, your content area will shrink and force your visitors to scroll. You should always assume that your visitors hate to scroll.

When I was in ecommerce it was alway a tense time in the office just before we hit the send button on our email campaigns to customers. Was there a typo or a broken link in the message that we missed? I've created a list of things to check before you hit that send button.

- Does the subject line have a call to action that makes the reader want to click on it to read more?

- If you re-mail a previously sent campaign make sure you change your subject line.

- Have a few people proof read the email. The more eyes that look at the email before you send it out to your customers the better.

- Always have the important portion of the message at beginning of the email. This will help ensure that it will be read by the recipient and not cut off at the bottom of the window.

- If you're reusing an previous email campaign because it was very effective make sure you update any dates and offer codes that may be in the message.

- Are you using images in your email campaign? If so you want to add "alternative text" with the image. When you use "alternative text" it will display text in the images place when images are turned off in the recipients email client.

- Test all of the links that are in your the email message! Nothing is more discouraging to a recipient than a broken link.

- Every email campaign you send needs to have a postal address and an explanation on how recipient can unsubscribe to future emails.

- I can't emphasize enough to TEST! You should get an email account with all the major mail providers that you can use for testing your email campaigns. Here is a small list of the accounts that I recommend:

GMail
AOL
Yahoo
Hotmail

- I also recommend always having the latest version of Outlook. When Microsoft released Outlook 2007 they changed the engine it uses to render HTML changing the way emails were displayed to the recipient.

Good luck with your email campaigns!